Dagmar

I don't disagree with you. I think that we will see little real change after the election. After December 1st we will subject to the primacy of EU law anyway to the next government is little more than a talking shop with little real power.

I think that this might sum up Gordon Brown and nu-Labour.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3S-G80m_DU&feature=player_embedded]YouTube - 99 Red Balloons: The New Labour disaster in 4 minutes[/ame]

Arob;

Thanks for that, I had a good laugh.

I take it that you are a GB supporter. He'll be writing out a personal letter of thanks to those who voted for his party next May.

It won't take long and he'll have plenty of time on his hands.

Yours will be the one adressed to 'Arab'

Remember;a major difference between apples and pears, which affects their pruning, is that the branches aren't as strong and have an occasional propensity to snap . One way to build up the strength of the branches, is to prune as for apple trees but continue the formative (or restorative) pruning for eight years rather than four. This means repeating the pruning for year four through years five to eight.

Pear trees bear their fruit closer to main branches than apples. So,allow around 8 main branches to form rather than the four or five that you would for apple trees.

Last summer I was involved with some apple and pear trees in Italy that were reputed to be 500 years old. There was documented 'proof' that the trees were growing in the same spot for this period ( at an old monastry). What is not clear, and by the way is the most probable scenario, is whether the tree was in fact grafted back onto the rootstock. This could have happened several times had the tree begun to fail. In the UK there are trees that are known to be in excess of 200 years old, these are of interst as they often are old and even lost varieties.

Some good info here:The oldest apple tree in Britain?

The staff at Bernwode are always pleased to hear of old fruit trees and can be contacted via the website above.The only way to sure of a variety is from the fruit, so if you have an example or a photo of it should be identfiable.

Thats the most strangest video I have ever seen about anything ever.

Yes, it is very strange.

This is quite good.

[ame]

.....................

Personaly I'd like to see marine reserves where rod and line fishing is allowed but no commercial fishing, these should be large inshore areas where hopefuly fish could breed and grow relatively un-molested.

They have done this in the states! In some the income from sport fishing way exceeds the previous income from commercial fishing and the fish stocks are booming. See the link for details:http://mpa.gov/

I can't see the EU allowing any country to do this though, especially the UK. We'll just do whatever they say as usual and set up a whole load of regulatory non jobs to collect fines/license fees etc.

I need to open a new business account, but looking around I see some of our banks are a bit shaky. I'm happy for my personal account to stay where it is, but the business account, well..............

I pulled the following from another site;

"Bank shares plummeted today amid concerns that the latest government package to stabilise banks and encourage lending would not solve the deepening economic crisis.

Royal Bank of Scotland was the biggest faller in the FTSE 100 share index, its price collapsing by more than 66%, to 11.6p, after it warned of the largest loss in British corporate history of up to £28bn and its chief executive, Stephen Hester, admitted that full-scale nationalisation of the bank had been considered.

The taxpayer already owns 58% of RBS but this will soon rise to 68% when £5bn of preference shares owned by the government are converted into ordinary shares.

The first day of dealing in shares of the newly created Lloyds Banking Group resulted in a 34% drop to 65p. The bank, which now has more branches than any of its rivals, issued a trading statement insisting that Lloyds TSB had been trading "satisfactorily", while HBOS, which it rescued in a deal brokered by Gordon Brown, had not suffered any "significant change" in its trading position.

Unlike RBS, Lloyds TSB is not asking the government to convert the preference shares it owns in the combined bank into ordinary shares, which means the taxpayers' stake is staying at 44%.

Eric Daniels, the chief executive of Lloyds, said the bank was "continuing its ongoing constructive dialogue" with the government about the wide range of measures announced today. Among them is a plan to sell insurance to banks to help them cap the losses on loans that have turned sour in the credit crunch.

HSBC, the only bank listed on the stockmarket not to have raised any fresh funds, insisted it would not need to use the government insurance scheme."

I'm thinking HSBC then!

Any opinions?

I,ve always been under the impression that if caught using a top handle on the ground you would be fined £2000.

Surely, for this to be the case there would have to be an actual law in place regarding the correct situations in which this equipment can be used. If that is the case then it would apply to everyone, wouldn't it?

¿Le También es necesario que hable o entienda Vasco

Your statement that animals do not feel emotion (Dagmar) surely is subjective and not accepted scientific fact (wheres your references), bit DOGmatic aye. Is fear an emotion or auto response? animals feel that don't they.

 

QUOTE]

 

Here is a bit of science for you from............

 

Marian Stamp Dawkins

 

Anthropomorphism is not wrong. The problem is that, if unchecked, it leads to a complete absence of scientific rigour in the way we look at animals. Using anecdotes as data only makes matters worse, because this allows anyone to speculate on what a given animal is experiencing, without any standard for what counts as evidence. We are asked to believe, for example, that a female squirrel, inadvertently locked out of her nest by humans, conceived a plan to persuade those humans to let her back to her babies by standing on her hind legs and demonstrating that she had full teats and was therefore lactating. This implies not just a high degree of cognitive ability on the part of the squirrel, but also the attribution of a "theory of mind" - she knew that humans could be influenced - as well as her belief in our altruism. It ignores the simpler hypothesis that the natural anti-predator behaviour of squirrels includes chattering and standing on their hind legs.

 

Recent studies on animals have shown how simple local rules can lead to complex behaviour that mimics what we humans would achieve by more cognitive means. We might plan ahead if we were deciding where to move house. Bees do it by simple recruitment rules of following the most vigorously signalling bees around them. Dogs and horses have famously fooled large numbers of people into thinking they could count when all they were doing was reading the body language of a human who was really doing the counting. Likewise, the female squirrel could use her innate anti-predator behaviour to achieve an end that we might achieve in a completely different way using our big brains and the extraordinary capacity that language gives us to plan ahead.

 

I do believe that animals have emotions, but anthropomorphism is not the best way to study them, not least because it is unclear whether animals experience emotional states consciously as we do. We should be very careful in concluding that animals are conscious just because they behave like us. For a start, many human activities take place without our being consciously aware of what we are doing. What's more, our emotional states can be shifted by stimuli flashed so briefly that we are not consciously aware of having seen them (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 31, p 111). It seems that emotions do not have to be conscious, even in ourselves. Then there are the many activities we can do either consciously or unconsciously. Breathing, for example, can either be an automatic, unconscious process or can be brought under conscious control. So just because other species breathe "like us" does not necessarily mean that like us they are conscious of their breathing. They could be using the route that, in us, is unconscious.

 

If we really want to understand the worlds of non-human animals, we need a more rigorous, evidence-based approach to what it is like to be a horse, a dog or a squirrel. If we genuinely want to improve their lot from their point of view - as opposed to just making ourselves feel better - we should move away from seeing them as just like us, only with fur or feathers or scales, and look at their own particular needs. A little anthropomorphism may help. Too much is disastrously unscientific.

 

Marian Stamp Dawkins is professor of animal behaviour in the department of zoology, University of Oxford. Her new book, Observing Animal Behaviour: Design and analysis of quantitative data, will be published soon by Oxford University Press

 

However, this is not a situation I would be comfortable with, and more to the point I value the almost limitless unconditional emotion (however you label it) that I receive from my dogs. They hold no grudges……..

Of course they don't hold grudges .....to do so would be an emotional response wouldn't it!

Interestingly it has been demonstrated that children that grow up with dogs and are therefore exposed to the bugs, that were mentioned so scornfully earlier it this thread, are more healthy that those who life in a sterile human only household.

Yes, this sounds like hormesis, 'generally-favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors.'

It would seem that hormesis is not generally accepted by the medical profession but is accepted anecdotaly. The old adage that......' you had to eat a peck of dirt before you die', would seem to suggest that the principle was well known and accepted.

A peck being equivalent to 16 dry pints by volume - a fair bit of dirt

I would say the loyalty thing is based more on a pack instinct than selfishness.

 

I do agree on the humanity issue. The majority of "dog problems" are founded in peoples misunderstanding of the pack hierarchy.

 

Andy

I do agree with you. The point I was making was that many truly believe that a dog 'loves' them when in fact it cannot feel such an emotion and really just sees you as a provider for their needs. In too many homes the dog is elevated to the status of pack leader (top dog), this is where the trouble starts.

Dogs are not patriotic, their doo ( I cant use the word I want to because the use of that selection of letters is considered more offensive than the substance it describes) contains a bacteria that causes 75% of diarrhea cases. Which in turn keeps British workers away from work. Thus damaging the national economy. They are carnivorous pack animals. Never to be trusted. We spend more on dogs than we do on African famine. They smell horrible. Their saliva, which they are kind enough to share with kids, contains doggy doo, cos hey they eat it. They can't be taken thank god onto many beaches, you will have to fund this hobby and employ dog sitters. They do not have the capacity for love, they have well adapted survival instincts (cupboard love) People (and this is the worst thing of all) actually think that their dog is more important than my children. Can I eat doo and lick your face? You'd kick my teeth if I did that to you and you'd kill me if I did it to your kids. so why is it cute when these abhorrent creatures do it?

Don't get a dog!

I robot the book/movie is actually about the enemy within...dogs. And so many are fooled.

I really shouldn't sit on the fence so much.

This is all true. The reason that dogs were domesticated in the first place is that they were a very effective 'cave cleaner', eating any waste including human excrement. You really should not let them lick your face, share bowls etc. They should be kept outside. I have at present seven dogs. I only allow them into the house exceptionally.

I must say that I prefer them to some humans though, therir loyalty is endearing but is based on selfishness nothing more. Dogs are not human and should not be treated as such.

I think you're spot on. I'm not convinced that they can stop anyone collecting dead wood in a public forest or woodland though.

The right of people to collect wood from Britain’s forests that was created under the Magna Carta has been overturned due to health and safety fears.

read the whole thing here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3264458/Forestry-Commission-scraps-Magna-Carta-right-to-collect-woods-from-forests.html

I was under the impression that; if rights that were granted under Magna Carta were impinged, that in itself was 'unlawful', and could only be enforced if the party concerned consented to the new law.

Maybe a mass wood collection would be an idea?

It seems that 'Leaf signal theory' and its apparent evidence of coevolution, originally postulated by the late William Hamilton, a biologist at the University of Oxford, has been effectively disproved by Marco Archetti also of Oxford and his colleagues at the University of Talca in Chile.

Journal of Evolutionary Biology,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01469.x

I suppose leaf colour would be genetically determined so there's no reason why the ideas can't overlap.

It would be a indicator for coevolution.

I can't find much recent work on it. I remember it fascinated me when it was first postulated!

So an Oak lives for hundreds of years. Defoliating insects might have two generations a year. You'd think that the insects have the upper hand, they're mobile, breed fast, and can adapt over generations to any defences the tree might have. So how come the tree gets to live out its days???

 

Leaf signal theory?

All members of the cabinet are.

She is or was a privy councillor

MP are addressed as 'honourable'

Privy council members as 'right honourable'

[ame]

NOT

HMRC will acquire powers in 2009 to enter business premises and private homes used for business. For errors that are "careless, but non-deliberate", penalties of up to 30% of an unpaid tax bill can be levied. Fines worth 70% of the final tax bill could be imposed, should officials believe the taxpayer deliberately ignored the need to make a payment. Deliberate concealment could trigger fines worth 100% of the final tax bill.

These new powers will come into effect on April 1 2009.

Tax officers will gain powers to inspect and remove information and documents, while the Treasury will limit the amount taxpayers can reclaim in wrongly paid tax from six to four years. Income tax, capital gains tax, VAT and stamp duty tax will be among payments covered by the new regime. Fines can be imposed from March 2009 on tax bills calculated from March 2008.

I don't see much about having to prove anything here - if the inspector says that your on the fiddle then its "pay up chummy", if you make a mistake its a fine and I bet that anyone dealing in cash or a sunstantial part of the business is cash are going to come under special scrutiny.

The emphasis are mine